Fred Kent is a believer in the power of public space.
Kent is president of the New York City-based consulting firm, Projects
for Public Spaces (PPS), which brings to its clients a community-oriented
approach and organizational expertise to help communities and the people
in them reconnect with their public environments.

People contact PPS, said Kent, because they feel there
is a dearth of places that are comfortable to use, because they are concerned
the streets are too wide to cross safely, because the parks lack amenities
or a city's buildings are alienating. Because, in other words, they feel
a loss of community.
"Public spaces are places people view as important to community life
and daily experience," said Kent. "At PPS, we believe the community
should drive public space projects and not the other way around."

Further complicating the situation, he charged, is
the tendency of the professions whose roles interface with the public
realm -- architecture, transit operation, design, transportation engineering,
and others -- to have a very narrow focus on their own individual disciplines.

Said Kent, "It all boils down to common sense.
It's not ego-driven, it's "place"-driven. When you concentrate
on place, you're dealing with something much more important than the building."
At the heart of Kent's work is a compelling belief in the importance of
people. It's that simple. "Loneliness is one of the biggest problems
in this country today," he explained.

When he's at home in Brooklyn, Kent said he spends
a lot of time out on his stoop. "We live in the front, and not the
back, of the house," he said. "We are very much engaged in the
street."

In his work with communities, Kent has traveled all
over the world. PPS has amassed a collection of a half-million slides
and clients throughout the globe. He has a bachelor's degree in economics
but has studied transportation, planning and anthropology as well. In
graduate school at Columbia University, he studied urban geography. He
has also studied with brilliant American anthropologist Margaret Mead
and with distinguished British economist Barbara Jackson (Baroness Jackson),
whose work influenced the thinking of a generation in matters like the
global environment and the plight of the world's poor.

In 1968, while working for Citibank, and with the bank's
support, Kent founded the Academy for Black and Latin Education, a New
York City street academy for high school dropouts. In 1970, he organized
the first Earth Day in New York City, which closed Fifth Avenue to automobiles
and saw over 100,000 people attend an ecology fair in Central Park. He
coordinated and chaired the event again in 1990, closing 17 blocks of
the Avenue of Americas to traffic so more than a million people could
visit environmental exhibits there. Close to a million people joined together
for an Earth Concert in Central Park.

Kent's mentor was William Hollingsworth ('Holly') Whyte
who died in 1999. The former editor of Fortune Magazine, urban theorist,
researcher, and author, Whyte wrote The Organization Man (1956),
his best known book, as well as several books about cities and public
space.

Whyte founded a grant-supported organization called
the Street Life Project to study the way people occupy open space in cities.
For 16 years, in New York and other cities, Whyte photographed, employed
time-lapse photo techniques, and recorded written observations on the
dynamics of "place." Kent was a research assistant in the Street
Life Program.

According to Kent, people were fascinated by Whyte.
"They appreciated his passion and respected him," he said. "They
thought he was on to something -- and he was."

A lot of what Whyte and his researchers learned seems
like common sense, but it never would have occurred to most of us. The
problem for many is the kind of "narrowing" we have experienced:
our suburban upbringing. This Whyte/Kent/PPS stuff is exactly contrary
to the experience of those of us who grew up in the suburbs.

For instance, Whyte discovered that people tend to
sit where there are places to sit. In order to have comfortable streets
and spaces, we should give people places to be, he said.

Wait a minute! A mind raised in suburbia must now ask,
"We should? Do we really want people sitting around out here?? What
about the evils of "loitering," and the manifold dangers of
"hanging around"?

People love to be around other people, said Whyte,
and they enjoy being around strangers more when there is a little something
they can control -- like a chair they can move. However, into the hapless
suburban mind springs images of chains -- picnic tables and benches at
the park, trash cans, all kinds of things linked up with heavy metal.
They must do all that chaining for a reason, a fearful voice whispers.

People have something Whyte called a "tendency
toward self-congestion" that propels us into the thick of things.
In a crowd, we enjoy a little jostling and bumping as we stand talking.
We have an innate urge to move toward the center of whatever space we
occupy.

Hold on there a minute. What about the suburban values
of independence, separation and standing alone -- the virtue of complete,
total self-reliance? Not to mention the safety issue -- what if someone
brushing you tried to rob you?

Walking beside a building with street-level windows
is pleasurable, Whyte found, because we enjoy seeing the people inside
going about their business. It gives us a sense of belonging. We even
like to wave at the people inside from time to time.

Mind your own business, screams the suburban alarm
system. Avert those eyes, never make eye contact. For God's sake, what
if they don't wave back?

Despite such attitudes, insists Kent, untrained people
are much better at seeing what a space can become.

Most of what Kent and his group have done over 25 years
has been in existing communities rather than in TNDs. However, Kent said,
the principles are the same. He added that while TNDs bring with them
the "re-emergence of civic activity" over time, people will
go back into their homes. It's important to keep re-energizing.?

Spaces evolve over time; flexibility must be built
into spaces to allow for that continuous dynamic evolution, he said.

Kent quotes Whyte to distill what inspires him in his
own work:

"I end in praise of small spaces. The multiplier
effect is tremendous. It is not just the number of people using them,
but the larger number who pass them and enjoy them vicariously, or the
even larger number who feel better about the city for knowledge of them.
"For a city, such places are priceless, whatever the cost. They are
built of a set of basics and they are right in front of our noses if we
will look."